The ancient history of Catholicism in the motherland gives me hope—and gives me pause.

This Black Catholic History Month, I reflect on what I have adopted for “spiritual roots” as a Black Catholic in the diaspora. I am like many African Americans who cannot directly trace the lineage of my paternal Black American ancestors back to the motherland. However, the story of the first pre-modern African kingdom that converted to Catholicism in the 15th century has resonated with me for decades.

I first came across the history of the Kingdom of Kongo as a student working toward a degree in comparative religious studies at San Jose State University and taking a course on “Magic, Science, and Religion.” Our professor assigned us a research paper on any topic we chose related to the class. While I did not have any proof at the time, I decided I would argue that some African people had converted to Christianity before being trafficked to the Americas in chains, and that they brought their faith with them. I was thrilled when I discovered the Kingdom of Kongo, which proved my thesis. 

Years later, I would learn more of this rich history in Cyprian Davis’ book “The History of Black Catholics in the United States.” When it was time for me to write my own book, “In the Shadow of Freedom: The Enduring Call for Racial Justice,” I leaned on the research of journalist Howard French’s “Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World.” Yet even while I proudly trace my spiritual roots to the Kingdom of Kongo, I must admit that both the Church’s seminal blessing on the transatlantic slave trade and the actions of an early Kongo king have caused me much anguish, questioning, and sorrow.

In the years 1452 and 1455, respectively, Pope Nicholas V issued the papal bulls “Dum Diversas” and “Romanus Pontifex,” which legitimized the Portuguese slave trade and gave its kingdom the right to enslave Africans south of Cape Bojador and hold them in perpetuity. A year after Christopher Columbus’s first expedition, commissioned by the king and queen of Spain, Pope Alexander VI issued papal bulls on May 3 and 4, 1493, which have come to constitute the (now disavowed) “Doctrine of Discovery” and played a central role in the Spanish colonization of the Americas. The May 4 bull, “Inter Caetera,” allowed land in the Americas not inhabited by Christians to be “discovered” and encouraged the overthrowing of “barbarous nations,” allegedly in order for Indigenous people to be brought to the Christian faith.

On May 3, 1491, a little over a year before Columbus’s first voyage, the Kongo King Nzinga a Nkuwu had converted to Catholicism and adopted the name João I. According to French, the kingdom’s territory covered an area of nearly 60,000 square miles in what is now Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. King João’s conversion was a direct result of Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão’s contact with the Kongolese in 1483. Cão landed in the kingdom and sent emissaries with gifts to the capital, but also kidnapped several Kongolese people and took them back to Portugal. Upon returning the hostages two years later with additional gifts, the Kongolese captives served as translators and witnesses for the Portuguese throne.

After King João’s conversion, he sent other Kongolese youth to Portugal to learn the language and receive other formal education. He also adopted Portuguese as the official language for his kingdom’s correspondence, diplomacy, and record-keeping. Before his death, he baptized his son, Mvemba a Nzinga, as a Catholic.

Mvemba a Nzinga ruled the Kingdom of Kongo as Afonso I from 1506 to 1543. He sent many of the Kongolese nobility, and even his own children, to Portugal and other European countries. His son Henrique was ordained a priest in Portugal in 1518, later becoming a titular bishop. From the 1530s and across the next century, Kongo sent missions to the Vatican and unsuccessfully petitioned Rome to grant it an episcopal see. Still, the kingdom would remain staunchly Catholic for two hundred more years.

According to Davis, while in power Afonso had two main concerns: to convert his people to Catholicism, to profit from the “technological knowledge of the Europeans,” and to control the “rapacious appetite of the Portuguese for riches and especially slaves.” At first, Afonso agreed with the Portuguese to trade enslaved Africans—many of whom he acquired through trade with the nearby Tio Kingdom. He supplemented the trade with copper, wax, ivory, and palm cloth. However, he soon realized the Portuguese demand for Africans was insatiable, as they seized even some of Afonso’s own family members. As a result, Afonso wrote King João (John) III of Portugal in 1529 stating that he wished to stop the sale of Africans because it was depopulating his country. João III threatened to end Portugal’s trade with the Kongo altogether if the African trafficking stopped. 

The threat apparently worked, because in another correspondence between the two kingdoms in 1540, Afonso ensured that his kingdom—more than any other in Africa—could supply Portugal with all the humans they wanted. 

According to French, by the second half of the sixteenth century, Portugal had founded a new colony at Luanda, next door to the Kingdom of Kongo to the south. Sugar production was expanding in Brazil, Portugal's colony in the Americas, and the need grew for enslaved Africans to cultivate it. By the 1560s, Africans had become essentially the only trading currency the Portuguese would readily accept in exchange for their goods. Over the duration of the transatlantic slave trade, 1.3 million Africans captured and sold into slavery were generated by Luanda, which made it the most prolific single source of enslaved people for the trade in the New World, including Kongolese Catholics trafficked to what would become the United States.

One such man was listed by name and age in the 1625 census for the British Colony of Virginia. John Pedro was a 30-year-old believed to be a practicing Catholic from a prominent family in Kongo. By the early 1650s, Pedro was listed as a free man, but was later executed in Maryland for his involvement in a Catholic dissident faction. 

In the following century, a group of Kongolese Catholics would unsuccessfully lead the Stono Rebellion, the largest revolt against slavery in the history of British North America. As detailed by Damian Costello, the revolt began on the feast of the Nativity of Mary. A majority of the enslaved in South Carolina were from the Kingdom of Kongo and practiced the Catholic faith. It is believed that the freedom fighters flew white flags in honor of the Blessed Virgin while they traveled toward St. Augustine—a Spanish colony in present-day Florida where they could gain their freedom—playing drums and chanting “Liberty!” Though the revolt would lead to death for the enslaved people instead of freedom, their courageous witness lives on.

Given all this, the Kingdom of Kongo is spiritually important to me for a few reasons. First, it proves that Christianity is not only a “White man’s religion” forced on people of African descent in the Americas. When many free Kongolese people were presented with the faith in their homeland, they fully adopted and embraced it. After all, Jesus was not historically White. He was a brown-skinned, Middle Eastern Jewish man in occupied territory. There were Catholic popes, great thinkers like Tertullian, and saints like Augustine from Africa. And Ethiopia is home to one of the earliest forms of Christianity overall.

Second, the Kingdom of Kongo’s rich history on equal footing with European kingdoms of its time is a testament against the dangerous White supremacist myths that Africans were “backward,” “subhuman," born to be subjugated, and possessing no history, culture, or livelihood before enslavement. Black people also call upon the known history of Mansa Musa, whom French describes as the richest man in the world, ruling during the Mali Empire’s golden era in the early 14th century, during a time when “the combined population of Mali’s subjects and vassals may have been as large as 50 million.” Yet somehow, the Kingdom of Kongo is often erased from our knowledge of history. We African Americans often don’t recognize that before our ancestors’ enslavement, they lived in kingdoms, nation-states, and tribes that had their own cultures, education, spirituality, and intelligence. They had agency, intellect, and pride.

Lastly, White people have justified the enslavement of African Americans as a way for those in chains to learn about Christianity per the Great Commission. But the Kingdom of Kongo is proof that missionary activity—not human trafficking and enslavement—could have been just as effective. The truth is that the Portuguese were more concerned with enslaving and trading Africans than they were with proselytizing. The Catholic Church not only stood by but also participated in the transatlantic slave trade and gave religious cover to three out of the five of the most influential and powerful European countries of that era: Portugal, Spain, and France. African Americans should not be taught that we’re “lucky” to have the Christian faith if it meant our ancestors were ripped from their families and homelands, forced to undergo the brutal Middle Passage, and forced into centuries of enslavement in the United States. One of the greatest gifts God has given humans is free will, but enslaved people of African descent did not have freedom.

So this Black Catholic History Month, I choose to remember and honor the brave Kongolese Catholics—and all Catholics from Africa and of African descent—who came before me and passed down the faith.

Alessandra Harris is author of two novels and is a wife, mother of four, and co-founder of BCM. She earned degrees in Comparative Religious studies and Middle East Studies and currently studies in the Diocese of San Jose's Institute for Leadership in Ministry. She has also contributed to publications such as America Magazine, Grotto Network, and US Catholic. Her third novel was released in 2022.

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